THE TALK OF THE TOWN

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.” Whether or not Mark Twain ever really said that line, it fits and resonates loudly as President Trump shuttles between the Oval Office and the Situation Room, weighing if he should dispatch bombers on yet another American sortie to the Middle East.

-  —David Remnick

First, the necessary caveats. Since seizing power, in 1979, Iran's theocracy has menaced its more than ninety million citizens and the wider region. The ayatollahs have deprived the country of a prosperous civil society, channelling resources instead into militarism and messianic fantasy. The regime relies on repression—crackdowns, imprisonment, torture, executions—to maintain control of a stifled and restive population. Many among the country’s educated élite have emigrated. The ranks of the leadership are staffed, in large measure, with satraps and mediocrities. Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons in tandem with its nuclear-energy project has proved a pointless catastrophe—most of all for the Iranians themselves. As Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, notes, the nuclear program has been a practical and a strategic “albatross”; it supplies only about one per cent of Iran’s energy needs but has cost up to five hundred billion dollars in construction, research, and the penalties of international sanctions.

Meanwhile, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei—the Supreme Leader since 1989 and now eighty-six years old—pursues his regime’s martial goals and ominous fantasies. In 2015, he vowed that Israel, which shares no border with Iran, would disappear by 2040. The regime has projected force through the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and has bankrolled proxy militias throughout the region: Hezbollah, in Lebanon; Hamas, in Gaza; the Houthis, in Yemen; and, in Iraq, the Islamic Resistance. Armed and advised by Tehran, these groups have all carried out lethal operations.